Director on Where Battleship Went Wrong

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Peter Berg says the film was too expensive for its own good.

By Max Nicholson

Last Sunday, director-actor Peter Berg took part in a discussion at the Produced By Conference called "Passion Projects: Making Films Everyone Says Will Never Get Made." Of course, the filmmaker's last effort, Battleship, was generally considered anything but a passion project. During the panel, Berg gave his two cents on why his sci-fi naval pic didn't pan out at the box office.

Exit Theatre Mode

"I have a movie in theaters right now which has obviously underperformed in many ways," he said, according to TheWrap. "When [a movie] doesn't work, it's an... interesting opportunity to look at what went wrong and how it went wrong... It was a movie that I tried as hard as I could to get inside of. But the concept is so big and powerful, and the money is so big and so powerful, that the movie is going to run away with itself."

In the end, Berg noted that he was never able to make that personal connection with the material. "I want to get inside the movie's world and feel like I know it better than anyone, and I couldn't do that... It was an interesting eye-opener," he concluded.

With a production budget of $209 million, Battleship has only managed to gross $59.8 million domestically since its release on May 18.